Sequestration: Excuses, excuses, excuses

President Barack Obama and members of Congress have dubbed sequestration “stupid,” “dumb” and “irresponsible.” But here’s one thing none of them are calling it: “My fault.”

With across-the-board spending cuts about to start March 1 absent a last-minute breakthrough, the excuses are piling up for how the country is yet again on the brink of a new fiscal fiasco that has everything to do with the other guy.

Text Size

Obama on sequester deal: 'Hope springs eternal'

"The Scrum" PODCAST: Sequestration

It’s hard to know who will end up taking the biggest political hit if the latest Washington-induced crisis moves from theoretical to real — but the answer may well lie in which side can get the public to buy into its finger-pointing at the other side.

That’s why the excuses matter: Polls show Obama has the upper hand now over unpopular lawmakers, but much can change if sequestration upends the country’s economic recovery and Americans lose their jobs and access to popular government services.

Here’s a look at 10 of the most frequent excuses employed by Democrats and Republicans as the sequestration debate reaches its climax:

1. House GOP: Hey, we did our job. What’s Obama waiting for?

House Speaker John Boehner was back to this argument Wednesday after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that most of his civilian employees would face furloughs if the sequester starts next week. The Ohio Republican cited two House-passed bills from last Congress that would replace the sequester with “common-sense cuts and reforms that protect our national security.”

But here’s the problem: Both of the House bills shift much of the cuts away from the Pentagon and onto other cash-strapped domestic agencies. For that reason, both were long ago considered DOA in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

2. Obama and the Democrats: Yup, Republicans are STILL protecting the rich.

The nation’s debt is so deep that sequester alone won’t fix it. Democrats say Republicans know this, but ideology won’t let them go along with some of the other ideas on the table, including overhauling the country’s clunky tax code and even making changes to entitlement programs.

Without new tax revenue, Democratic party leaders say there’s really no way out of this mess. “With our economy fragile and the uncertainty in the economy, to just burn the house down right now makes no sense to me,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the No. 4 Democrat in leadership, told POLITICO. “It needs to be balanced, balanced, balanced.”

Another liberal, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), echoed Obama’s call for raising revenue by closing loopholes and limiting deductions that benefit the rich. “The wealthy are doing phenomenally well while the middle class is getting decimated,” he said in an interview.

3. Both sides: Don’t look at me. I didn't vote for it in the first place.

This is the refrain available for about 130 House members and 25 senators still serving from the last Congress who voted “Nay” when the Budget Control Act hit the floor in August 2011. Conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats both fall into this category, allowing them to take credit for being among the first to register their objections to the idea of blunt spending cuts triggered if the so-called supercommittee couldn’t reach its own deal on more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction.

Of course, “I told you so” doesn’t exactly make the spending cuts any easier to swallow.